There are many threats that organizations face when it comes to the reliability and viability of their data. Logical corruption, hardware failures, or loss of data due to viruses and software bugs can all compromise data and result in costly downtime for an organization. As a result, many organizations establish a disaster recovery plan that ensures a viable copy of data is available at all times. Disaster recovery plans often involve replicating data to an independent storage system at a remote geographic location.
Data replication may be implemented in various types of networks, including Fibre channel and Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Unfortunately, traditional replication appliances may not account for the differences in network types when optimizing replication data flow. What is needed, therefore, is a more exact and effective mechanism for managing replication data flow among different types of networks.